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What does "language support" actually mean?

microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation setup

The reason for the question is that my wife just got a new laptop with Vista.
She has a desktop with XP, and has a lot of Arabic support installed. She
regularly deals with (reads, types, prints) documents in both English and
Arabic. The Vista laptop doesn't seem to want to do any of this, and she
just found an explanation that "support" for languages other than the selected
language is removed during initial setup. She's kinda pissed, and wonders
if she's looking at a multi-hundred $$$ upgrade to get it working for the
things she bought it for.

Now, discussions here seem to imply that language "support" means things like
the buttons, menus, etc in a language. She doesn't want those things in Arabic;
English is fine. But she does want to be able to type in Arabic, often mixed
with English in the same document.

So is there a doc somewhere saying what's meant by "support" for multiple
languages? Is is possible to do as we do on a Mac, having the buttons and
menus in English, but display/type/print other languages? If so, what do
we really need installed? Do we really need Vista Ultimate to be allowed
to type non-ASCII characters?

I regularly type German, French, Swedish, Finnish, and Mandarin pinyin on
the Mac without even switching keyboards; I just use the "U.S. Extended"
keyboard. Does Vista have anything comparable?